Audiobook Review – At Grave’s End – Jeaniene Frost

12Nov

At Grave’s EndAuthor: Jeaniene FrostSeries: #3 in the Night Huntress series

Narrator: Tavia GilbertRun Time: 9hrs and 28 minutes

Book Description:
It should be the best time of half-vampire Cat Crawfield’s life. With her undead lover Bones at her side, she’s successfully protected mortals from the rogue undead. But though Cat’s worn disguise after disguise to keep her true identity a secret from the brazen bloodsuckers, her cover’s finally been blown, placing her in terrible danger.

As if that wasn’t enough, a woman from Bones’s past is determined to bury him once and for all. Caught in the crosshairs of a vengeful vamp, yet determined to help Bones stop a lethal magic from being unleashed, Cat’s about to learn the true meaning of bad blood. And the tricks she’s learned as a special agent won’t help her. She will need to fully embrace her vampire instincts in order to save herself—and Bones—from a fate worse than the grave.

Review
This is a hard book for me to review because my thoughts on the narration have completely taken over my thoughts on the book itself, and I am having a hard time separating the two. So I am going to break from my normal mode, and review the audiobook narration first and then hopefully touch on some of the book specific comments. Many of these audiobook comments can also be found on the Audible.com page for this audiobook. Having read the previous 2 books in the series on my kindle, I decided to try something different and listen to book 3 for a challenge. Going into it, I had heard varying opinions about the narration, specifically focused on the voice of Bones and after listening I would definately say that I fall into the negative. I have to wonder if my opinion would have been changed if I had listened to all of the books, but i don’t know.

Typically I like Tavia Gilbert’s narration, but something with this just didn’t work – I HATED Bones voice – he sounded like an Australian teen high on something – now admitedly based on the backstory, he did spend some time in Australia before he became a vampire and after, but he is also supposed to be British, so the voice just didn’t work for me. I imagine him more sounding like James Marsters who played Spike on Buffy way back when. My other, albiet small complaint, was about some of the word pronunciation. One of the main secondary characters is Don, but for the life of me every time I heard her say his name, is sounded like Dawn…and then on the one occurrence when Dawn is said, it sounded like Don…

But that being said, narration aside, I didn’t mind the book. Cat was a bit more whiny/clingy in this book than she had been in previous ones. She wasn’t as kick-ass as I was expecting her to be and oh the drama and the death. Without disclosing any spoilers, some serious shit went down in this book and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in later books. I can say that I will be reading the rest of them and not listening.

Overall, i’d give the narration only 2 stars, but the book itself 3.5-4. So adding them together about 3 stars over all. I do think that people who like UF should read this series if they haven’t started yet.

Dee…I am completely up to date with Cat and Bones and love this series, I have read not listened to them all. That being said, I listened to Once Burned the spin off with Vlad. OMG, I was appalled at the way she made Bones sound. It’s horrible and I will NOT be listening to her again. Bones is one of my all time favorite alpha males and she made him sound like a retard. HORRIBLE!!!

I plan on it – I was just looking for an audiobook to listen to and I had picked this one up during a sale. I actually left a negative review on audible for it and they asked me if I wanted to return the book

As an Australian myself I don’t think Bones sounded Aussie, to me, he sounded cockney. The main issue was that his voice wasn’t deep enough. Having listened to all of the books though, I can say that his voice grew on me and now I don’t really notice – it’s just “him”. I totally agree with you about Don – even when Cat says it its not always clear LOL.

I do enjoy the Night Huntress series on audio but I had some warning about Bones’ voice ahead of time and was assured that I’d get over it if I stuck with it. And, fortunately in this case, it did.

The first book i read (audio book) was First Drop of Crimson because I didn’t realize it was book 1 of a spin-off. I thought Bones’s voice was horribly squeaky and unappealing, especially compared to Spade’s voice. Then I started the main series (on book 3 now) all on audio books, and now I really like the voice of Bones! It definitely grew on me within the first book of the main series. I agree with kaetrin that he sounds more cockney than Aussie.
I completely agree Dee on the Don/dawn thing!